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Saturday, 2 August 2014

Old School is the New School - Meet the Heroes

We're taking a break from Fate based games for a few sessions (which is a few months for a fortnightly game), next up is +Sarah Newton's Monsters & Magic.

The first session of play was postponed but the characters are all created and in a few days they'll be off to Silvermoon.

I've abbreviated the character sheet to provide stat blocks for our occasionally intrepid, probably murderous, almost certainly of questionable moral character quote "heroes" below. As well as a short bio of each of them. You may draw your own conclusions as to where each of them sit on the GNS scale.

First up is the thief. Who needs a high Charisma simply to stop townsfolk laughing at his name,

parents can be cruel sometimes. Thiefly is quite sure of his abilities as a first level thief. A master of two weapon fighting and an expert marksman, or at least he will be if his plans pan out. Like many heartbreaker thieves he is a Chaotic Neutral monomaniacal sociopath with a borderline personality disorder. His alignment focus is to "Rob from the Rich B******s" and his drift is "Punish the Unworthy". As by punish he means torture and kill, this is a drift towards Evil.

Next I'd like to introduce the party's religious zealot, Patience, blessed novitiate of Ororo the Storm Goddess.

Patience's goal is to become high priestess of the Cult of Storms. She is Neutral Good as befits the cleric of a nature deity. Her focus is "Force of Nature", so whenever she acts in a capricious or willful way, or smites her enemies with storms' force she is acting according to her focus. That can go a bit far though, her drift is "Ororo's Word is Law", pulling her towards Lawful.

Patience smites her foes with the hammer of thunder an javelin of lightning, her spiritual weapons.

Were this to be a full campaign I would expect Patience to become the most powerful of the group if it plays out anything like the old Basic through Master sets.

This motley group of heroes is rounded out by "The Nameless One", a magic user par excellence. Neutral Good like Patience, his motivations are unknown, and unknowable. His history is a mystery. His magic is magnificent, and his power will be terrible to behold, (if the glass ninja makes it to the end of day one).

Ok, so nameless doesn't have a name because we've not finished character gen for him as the game was postponed due to illness. It sounds good though.

This post was written with tongue firmly in cheek. Obviously we won't know how it all gels together until after the first session but Silvermoon is tightly written which will give us a chance to really get to grips with the rules before we strike of on an adventure of our own devising. (Or one repurposed from the archives, I have a particular fancy for Isle of Dread).

The blend of old and new school rules should work well for this group as we started as a Fate gang post-kickstarter. Most of us have been gaming in one form or another for a few years and I think the biggest risk is not that we don't get the rules but that we approach the game in too whimsical a mood. I've read through the rules a few times and picked up Collectanea Creaturae with the idea of using that to lighten the load on re-tooling some classic adventures, (Eyrie of the Slave Lords anyone?).

OSR games are meant to be fun but I think that has to be tempered by an attempt to (re)capture some of that original excitement, trepidation and character investment that came with the genre first time around. Players, if you are reading this I mean you. I'll even draw a map.